The killings occurred one week into a strike over
pay by several thousand rock drill operators at the Lonmin-operated
platinum mine in Marikana. Despite the massacre, workers remained on strike and
a month later won a settlement that went a substantial way towards
meeting their initial pay claim.

An ongoing public investigation has continued to
shine a public spotlight on this tragic event, while the reverberations
of South Africa’s first post-apartheid massacre linger on in a number of
important ways.

Cold-blooded murder

Footage collected in the powerful documentary Miners Shot Down has provided ample evidence of the police forces’ pre-mediated actions against striking workers. Perhaps the clearest signal was the presence of four
mortuary vans, summonsed to the protest site on the morning of August
16 before a single shot had been fired.

This version of events has been collaborated by evidence presented to the Farlam Commission of inquiry into Marikana.

Shadrack Zandisile Mtshamba, a Lonmin rockdrill operator, told the
commission: “There was sound of gunfire from all sides… One man said
we should surrender. He raised his arms. He was shot on the right arm
and he bent down.

“He raised his hands and said we should surrender.
He was shot again in the stomach. The third bullet shot his leg and he
fell down.”

Mtshamba said another miner was shot in the neck as he too tried to surrender. “He fell on his face. We became scared of surrendering after witnessing the shootings.”

As the miners lay face down on the ground, police
officers searched and kicked them, “bragging among themselves about the
manner in which they had taken people down.They said if it were in Zimbabwe, they would burn us alive with petrol.”

In all, 17 miners were killed at the initial site of the protest.

A further 17 died at a nearby hill as a result of
what, evidence suggests, were extrajudicial killings. A number of
workers who had attempted to flee the scene and hide from police were
found there with wounds to the back of the head, from bullets that had
been shot at close range.

Another 78 mineworkers suffered gunshot wounds that day.

While no officer has been charged for the
killings, 270 mineworkers were arrested and initially charged with the
“murder” of their fellow workmates.These charges were later downgraded, and later dropped.

State-business collusion

The commission has also revealed how the culpability for
the killings went well beyond the security forces who shot at the
protesters. Dali Mpofu, the lawyer for the 270 arrested mine workers, explained to
the Farlam commission: “At the heart of this was the toxic collusion
between the South African Police Services and Lonmin at a direct level. At a much broader level it can be called a
collusion between the state and capital and that this phenomenon is at
the centre of what has occurred here.”

In the days leading up to the massacre, Lonmin
collaborated with the police, providing them with crucial logistical
support in the form of offices, intelligence reports, access to more
than 200 security cameras around the mine, barracks for the police,
transport, a helicopter and a detention camp.

They did so because they feared the strike could
spark further unrest in South Africa’s platinum belt, source of 80% of the
world’s production of this precious metal.

This meant that the strike also posed a threat the
ruling African National Congress (ANC) that had long ago dropped its
historic demand to nationalise the mines, and had instead chosen to cuddle
up to the mining industry.

The wildcat strike also represented a threat to ANC-aligned trade unions, in particular the National Union of Miners (NUM). NUM opposed the demands of its own members and their
decision to take unprotected strike action, which they saw as a direct
challenge to the traditional institutions of management-trade union
negotiations.

In fact, when Lonmin workers marched on the local
NUM offices to demand their union represent them, gunmen within the
offices shot at the workers, leaving two dead.

Then, just days prior to the massacre, NUM general secretary Frans Baleni issued a press release calling
“for the deployment of a special task force or the [South African
National Defence Force] to deal decisively with the criminal elements”
behind the strike.

It was this same task force that carried out the massacre at Marikana, and left at least 10 NUM members dead.

Cyril Ramaphosa

The nexus between mining capital, ANC politicians
and the trade union bureaucracy is most clearly personified by Cyril
Ramaphosa. As a founder of NUM in the early 1980s, Ramaphosa led some important miners’ strikes against the apartheid regime.

Ramaphosa went on to rise through the ranks of the
ANC and headed its team to negotiate the end of apartheid. He was
subsequently elected chairperson of the
constituent assembly entrusted with drafting up South Africa’s new
constitution.

In 1996 Ramaphosa decided to concentrate on his business dealings.

Ramaphosa’s personal wealth is estimated to be over
$600 million and he sits on the board of a number of companies,
including being on the board of Lonmin at the time of the massacre.

On the day before the massacre, Ramaphosa sent an
email to Lonmin's chief commercial officer, in which he called the
action of the strikers “plainly dastardly criminal” and said
“concomitant action [was needed] to address this situation".

Other emails sent that same day reveal Ramaphosa
told then police minister Nathi Mthethwa to come down hard on striking
miners and warned former mining minister Susan Shabangu that her
“silence and inaction” about the happenings at Lonmin was “bad for her
and government”.

Despite the public outcry over Ramaphosa’s
involvement in the events at Marikana, he was elected to the post of ANC
deputy president at the party’s December 2012 congress.

Lasting impact

Marikana will go down in history as South Africa’s
first post-apartheid massacre, and will take its place alongside those
that occurred in Sharpeville (1960) and Soweto (1976).

Like those events, Marikana also marks a turning point in South African politics.

In many ways its impact resembles how Ruth First, a
Communist Party leader killed by the apartheid regime in 1982, described the
1946 African mineworkers strike. At the time, police attacked the 70,000-strong
strike, with at least nine miners being killed. While workers soon after
returned to work, with little to show for their efforts, some have said
this event was the starting point for what became South Africa’s
anti-apartheid movement.

Ruth First wrote that the 1946 miners' strike “was one of
the those great historic incidents that, in a flash of illumination,
educate a nation, reveal what has been hidden, destroy lies and
illusions. The strike transformed African politics overnight. The timid opportunism and servile begging for favours disappeared.”

This is precisely what business and the state had
feared, and exactly what has occurred since, with the example of
Marikana going on to inspire a wave of strike actions in the mining
sector and beyond.

Between August and October 2012, more than 60,000
miners participated in a series of unprotected, non-union organised
strikes across several of South Africa’s most important platinum and
gold mines. In November 2012, an unprecedented strike wave broke out across farming areas in the Western Cape, leading to a pay increase of more than 50% by early 2013.

Meanwhile in community townships, considerably more protests were registered in 2012 compared to any previous year. In numerous cases, protesters and observers made
reference to Marikana, which has come to represent a catchphrase for
resistance.

Left-wing union officials have recounted how workers
have spoken openly at national bargaining conferences about doing a "Marikana", while a Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) spokesperson responded to the farmworkers'
rebellion by declaring : “Marikana has come to the farms!”

At least four settlements have renamed themselves
Marikana. Asked why, one of the residents of the Marikana settlement in Potchefstroom, said: "We will do exactly as they did at Marikana, and we
will get what is ours."

And there is no sign of the Marikana effect waning.

Last year saw a further 15.2% increase in the rate of strike incidences, taking it to an all-time high. This year has already witnessed important disputes
such as the five-month-long strike by 70,000 workers in the platinum sector, and a month-long
strike by 220,000 metalworkers and engineers.

Tellingly, unions that continue to support the
Tripartite Alliance, which includes the ANC, the South African Communist
Party and COSATU, led neither.

The Association of Mineworkers and Construction
Union (AMCU), which since it was formed in 2001 has never been aligned to
the ANC, headed up the dispute in the platinum minefields. Its new-found militancy is largely a result of the
mass influx of some 100,000 new members in 2012 alone (swelling its
membership to 120,000). This was largely due to its supportive role during the Marikana dispute.

In many cases, after the non-union strikes in the
mining sector ended, workers gradually dissolved their committees into
AMCU branches, feeling the need for a union for collective bargaining.

AMCU has now surpassed NUM as the biggest union in
the platinum belt, while NUM has lost its status as South Africa’s
largest union.

Today, NUMSA is the main driving force behind a
left-wing challenge to the existing COSATU leadership that proposes
breaking with the Tripartite Alliance and creating a new workers' party
to challenge the ANC.

What will be the lasting impact of Marikana? Two years on, it is too early to say.

However, it is evident that significant political
dynamics have been unleashed by those fateful events at Marikana, which
have left an indelible bloodstain on post-apartheid South Africa.